The Story
It is 1992 and a young Belgrade medical student, committed to devoting her life to the caring professions, begins to realise that her Bosnian Serb father is responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Croatian and Bosnian citizens in conflicts tearing through Yugoslavia. Close to her father, she is shocked into denial. But her response to her fellow medical student boyfriend’s challenge to her to renounce the genocidal killer he has become is not just shocking; it will have repercussions for everyone close to her for decades.
Goran’s Dilemma, Phil Murphy’s first novel, is based on the real relationship of Ana Mladić and her father, Ratko. Phil uses the events of 1991-5 to capture the agony of her dilemma and the impact of her response to it in a story of cruelty and compassion that captures the human costs of the fall of Yugoslavia.
The Story behind the Story
Phil was driven to research the fall of Yugoslavia and to write two novels about this period in contemporary history after visiting Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, just a couple of months after the end of a near four-year siege. Barely a city centre windowpane was left intact. How could a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural European city be allowed to be besieged for so long without meaningful intervention from ‘the West’?
His concern became that these were Europe’s ‘forgotten wars’ – an inconvenience to the West at a time when the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union had broken up and Saddam Hussein had been expelled from Kuwait. Did the fall of Yugoslavia and its estimated 100,000-140,000 deaths across the Balkans in just four years threaten to disrupt the narrative that liberal democracy had vanquished all alternatives and we were at “the end of history”?
“Given the fact that, after the Srebrenica massacre, the wars were brought to an end robustly and rapidly, why could this not have been done one, two or three years earlier, saving tens of thousands of lives?” says Phil.
The reasons behind the break-up of Yugoslavia were multiple and complex. Phil seeks to explain the background that led to the events of 1991-5 in a series of blogs posted on this site.